Valheim’s biggest secret? Trust the player

I’m totally fascinated by the early access game Valheim, and with over 4 million copies sold since its launch, I’m not alone. I am also a diligent survival game fan, and play almost every example of the genre I can find.

But something left Valheim is different. More refined and elegant. It all comes down to one thing: Designing negative space.

The concept came up while I was sitting with our design team at Blackbird Interactive during our weekly Design Sync, in which we discuss recent games, design principles, and phenomena. The team consists of brilliant designers of all careers: Elliot Hudson, our creative director; Jeremy Hardy, who leads our shipping team; Ian Longiaru and Ryan LeMesurier, who are part of the ship design team; Jason Barth, who works on our economy and progression systems; and Vidhi Shah, who is our designer behind many of the in-bay systems and user experience work.

Negative space is the principle that what you utter is just as important in any artistic medium as what you include. The human brain tends to take into account what is missing just as much as is included in it, whether it means seeing additional shapes in a painting or taking up your art the necessary space to make it appear to the maximum. .

Negative space in game design usually refers to three things: the pace of how content is exposed to players, how systems interact with each other, and the complexity of those systems. This is how Valheim use such a large negative space, and the most important requirement to make this approach work well.

You have exactly as much time as you need

Lots of ValheimThe ingenuity lies in its clever progression system, which shows an underlying confidence in the player. If you’ve ever played a game that felt like it’s constantly anxious that you’re getting things done and that you’re throwing system after system and searching after you … well, Valheim is the antithesis of this.

You start with a simple mission: build a small shelter and get to know the first two biomes. The pasture is deliberately quiet and safe. You may encounter a gray dwarf here and there, but overall it is the anchor of most of the world’s progress, and the place I always return to as I venture further and further. The pastures deliberately provide a lot of resources, which gives a signal to safety and a lot of space to play around with the building system.

The Valheim The team is careful in how the game exposes progress and resources to you, so you work hard and work through a number of challenges to reach the next amount of resources.

Each resource collected is on an increasing risk curve that fits well with your personal skill and advancement of equipment, which means that the focus is put first and that the game never gets too grim or overwhelming with resource management.

For example, Valheim start collecting wood, stone and flint. These resources relate to the progress of building tools and weapons, which is perfectly suited for your first two biomes: the meadow and the black forest. Other resources that require more advanced equipment in the game to process are not something you can achieve, and they may even be out of sight or locked up by an increase in risks.

Entering the plains or swamps would be a death sentence at this point, so there is little temptation to try to charge in advance before you are ready. Each area prepares you for the next, at your own pace, while protecting you from the overwhelming amount of possibilities to mix different tools, biomes and enemies at once. It is up to you to learn and grow and decide when to go to the next challenge.

Even Valheimbuilding system does it! By only having access to wooden buildings and not having stone and iron beams, for example, you can understand the basic system on a basic level and work on it before moving on to more complex ideas. There is enough room to experiment meaningfully and get lost in every stage of progress and spend as much time there as you want.

Each progress section is concluded by a fairly challenging boss battle, which gates the progress in new tools, biomes and equipment until you are ready for it. It’s a brilliant system for deliberately creating negative space, giving players the time and freedom to experiment with current tools until they’re really ready to tackle more systems. There is never a rush. After proving that you understand the basics of the building system and how you can survive, you unlock the ability to exploit by giving the first boss so that you can further explore the possibilities of new resources.

Give the simplicity, let the player bring the complexity

Designing negative space requires developers to give players room for experimentation and imagination without confusing the canvas with too much content, and that they have their inner anxiety about whether players have enough to do.

The Valheim developers seem to trust themselves as much as they trust the players. Valheim does not need complicated skill trees; instead, players learn by doing. You progress by using tools and weapons and repeating tasks. It forces players to try different types of taxes – game designers sometimes refer to the way players experiment as ‘expressions’ during the game. Therefore no instrument or action is wasted; all times invested in experimenting and trying new things are valid and often yield positive results for progression.

As part of his combat system, Valheim lean in a similar simplicity and elegance as games like Dark Souls and even Breath of nature: A handful of weapons, a stamina system and a parry / block system are enough to make it shine. No skills, no magic – just you and your enemies. All of this is thematically sound, and it includes the awkward philosophy with enough complexity to reward players who explore the boundaries and use cases of each weapon to find out where their personal preferences lie.

Even as an avid survival game with an affinity to build, I was amazed at how much freedom and playfulness I would gain Valheims seemingly simple and limited building system. The structural pieces available are much less than expected. But combined with a freeform placement and the ability to snap pieces together while taking stability into account, so many expressions become exciting for the player.

From those who just want to build a simple hut, to those who want to build large, authentic longhouses, to those who want to make stunning images: Valheim always leave enough space for players to express themselves, even within the simple rules and options.

It is also an expression of design-negative space: a limited canvas, limited pieces, but it can all be used, but you can get away with it safely. The possibilities for experimentation and imagination feel as if they are in an almost perfect balance with the amount of options given to the player: never too much, always more competent than it may initially appear.

Trust your player

It all comes down to one guideline, which is used gracefully: trust your player.

Valheim do it masterfully. It does not require you to get lost in intricate metagame mazes, and that no skill trees get in the way. The design seems to say one thing: just go play out. There is always plenty to do, always more to explore; you can take as much as so little time in each phase. There are always enough pieces to play with in this kind of interconnected system of seemingly simple features that keep you on your toes.

Games that give the player as much freedom for experimentation and discovery as Valheim do have player confidence as their most important ingredient. Elegance in design and especially design negative space requires that designers trust that players will find pleasure in filling the negative space with joy, with comedy, creativity or anything else. But they have to trust that the players will do it something of value with it.

This is a narrow thing to do as a developer: our audience always has other games to play, more backlogs to work through. Sometimes we feel the need to create dense content to keep a player’s attention. Sometimes the need for a smaller scale can make the decision of us, and sometimes we ourselves take the confidence that our players have room to experiment. But in any case, it requires a trust that is not easy.

At first glance, Valheim may not look like a game that will inspire such features. But his great success and word-of-mouth distribution is in my opinion all thanks to this particular formula.

Trust your player to fill your play areas with art, like wonderfully built sculptures and towns, and with comedy, like all the videos of players being hilariously hit by a domino effect of booms – this is what makes games dependent on the community most heart.

All developers need to do is provide the canvas … and enough space for players to breathe.